Costas Synolakis praises the Chinese government's willingness to accept outside aid after the devastating 7.9 tremblor, but faults its failure to enforce building codes.

G4 Web TV airs an extended discussion with B. Clifford Neuman of ISI, director of the USC Center for Computer Systems Security.

Aerospace engineering Prof. Geoff Spedding's bat flight studies received top billing in today's New York Times, as well as National Public Radio and Science Daily.

Professor Francisco Valero-Cuevas's work on brain-hand circuitry was featured in many widely read science and medical publications.

Wei-Min Shen introduces his modular, reconfigurable robots as part of a feature report by the British Broadcasting Company on the ongoing revolution in thinking machines.

CNET covers the ISI researcher's investigation of rates of student peer-to-peer file sharing, s study which casts doubt on industry claims of huge financial losses from university-based web exchanges of movie files.

Clifford Neuman, director of the USC Center for Computer Security, told KTLA-TV & KCBS audiences how attackers were able to disable the Church of Scientology website by overloading it.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, transportation expert James E. Moore, II, chair of the Daniel J. Epstein Department, and consultant Tom Rubin show how much public transit has been impacted by construction and funding of the city's rail network.

Maja Mataric's work on robots of all kinds was the subject of an extended segment on KTLA. Robots able to express emotion may become a reality within a decade, Mataric´ predicted; in the meantime, they are becoming more and more useful in the home, school, rest home, hospital — and even the yard.

"Michael Zyda, creator and Director of the USC GamePipe Laboratory for game development ... discussed his mission to reinvigorate computer science and invest more in the research, development and education of new game technology."

In a Houston Chronicle opinion essay, Viterbi Dean Yannis C. Yortsos argues for urgently increased federal funding supporting basic research in energy.

Paul Debevec of the Institute of Creative Technologies is a subject of a major Physics Today story on how computer scientists are giving animated films and videogames "some of the same magical eye the Renaissance painters had," by ingeniously applying the physics of the behavior of light.

The Los Angeles Business Journal reports on "El Segundo-based Geosemble Technologies Inc., a three-year-old spinoff from USC Viterbi School of Engineering," set up by computer scientists Cyrus Shahabi and Craig Knoblock. "Ten engineers have nurtured the baby technology since its inception in a USC classroom in 2000."

"The Viterbi School of Engineering placed 12th in the world in the engineering, technology and computer science programs category in the 2007 Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings of the world's top 100 universities," reported the USC Daily Trojan.

Research on airport security led by Milind Tambe of the Viterbi School department of computer science working with USC's Homeland Security-funded Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events received worldwide media attention.

The U.S. Office of CyberInfrastructure recently gave a 3-year grant to Ewa Deelman's project, which, says Deelman, "automatically chains dependent tasks together, so that a single scientist can complete complex computations that once required many different people."

Headlining the opening session of the SPE's first R&D conference, Dean Yannis "Yortsos [challenged] the audience to consider some of the major issues that may hinder innovation, 'namely the shortage of technical people, negative public perceptions of the E&P sector, and the challenge of producing the next trillion while transforming the industry into a leader of clean power initiatives'"

The Brazilian science magazine Galileu's September issue includes a Q&A with Najmedin Meshkati of the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, discussing issues ranging from Iran's nuclear program to quake-prone Japanese nuclear reactors to recent Brazilian air and oil platform disasters. (in Portuguese)

Viterbi School engineer Behrokh Khoshnevis' house-in-a-day automated construction technique makes the influential business magazine's short list of potentially revolutionary innovations.

The Viterbi school's much-honored William E. Leonard professor was in the Ural mountain region headlining a symposium on materials science innovation and commercialization with his photo on the front page the local paper paying tribute to the event's organizer, Professor Ruslan Valiyev, "a personality who is showing himself a leader." [Russian language pdf]